Clearly something is happening; the article just doesn’t make clear what.

The W. Post story was a pitch to an editor in 2002 for something on new diplomats in the post-9/11 world. Pre-Iraq, being a US diplomat was statistically more likely to get you killed than a career in the US armed forces. I knew a number of people starting in that line of work, and I thought it would be an interesting perspective, particularly amidst all the stories at the time on “first responders” and such. I also thought that “has also written for the Washington Post” might be semi-valuable in marketing terms.

But the price offered wasn’t enough to spend the time on. Life in a market economy.

If the prices at TNR, where I think I can get something in, are better than they were at the Post, it’s time to pitch. (I did a tasty little for Salon back during the boom, but even then it was only $400 including expenses, which, since they were travel to Berlin, ate at least half of it.)

And M. Blowhard is exactly right: way more than half is in networking, conceiving, pitching, accounting, billing, badgering, etc etc etc.

Even on my regular beat (biotech for a trade publication), the non-writing time is an enormous investment. In fact, the only reason I can write those stories in an hour or two is because of the time previously spent.

A buck and a quarter per word from Bride’s would be nice, particularly because it’s a fat book and could probably become steady. Fifty cents from Oz papers would not be bad either, depending on expenses involved and how steadily they would want things.

Anyway, from year five of freelancing, it looks like this to me: the biotech beat is continuous and reasonably lucrative; editing for English versions of corporate magazines is lucrative but sporadic; translating is also lucrative but sporadic (you don’t want to go near the commodity translating market); political writing and/or public speaking get my passionate interest but have to be cross-subsidized; and blogging & commenting are a good place to warm up, to try out new ideas, and possibly as a promotional.

But twenty grand a year, like we say back home, don’t get it.

So unless the legendary right-wing gravy train gets reinvented on the other side of the aisle, the political stuff will continue to share its slice of the portfolio with the other pro bono (or mostly pro bono) clients.

I can see—as eb points out above—people adding blogs as a means of communicating about things important to them. (An analog might be the very knowledgeable community of US Civil War historians outside the academy.) But what I can’t see, and here I think I’m agreeing with Henry against Rhoten, are people leaving even a non-tenured academic position on the hope that BlogAds will pay the mortgage.

I work in the media (where I enjoy a nice longterm staff job, thankyouveddymuch) and Joel Turnipseed’s guesstimates and evaluations strike me as spot-on. One thing he doesn’t mention which I will is the question of doing it over time. How long can you keep up the freelance-writing thing? As far as I can tell, there aren’t many who can keep it up for long. I’ve known people who’ve done well for two years, or ten years. But it’s exhausting, and most of them eventually grab a regular job, working for an academic quarterly as an editor, working on the staff of a grants organization or prize organization, teaching, whatever. It’s tough because you’re always starting from zero: more than half the work is the conceiving/pitching/billing thing. The writing itself sometimes looks pretty minor in the midst of it.

I think the “steady-fulltime-job crossed with blogging” is a very nice recipe myself.

From my experience, I think a good Australian freelance could make $A50 000 (about $US 35 000) from journalism and have a fair bit of time left over for books or other ventures.

In other words, an academic is prevented from becoming a public intellectual in the Trilling, Mumford, or Baldwin tradition because the venues simply don’t exist. (That’s one of the reasons I’m so excited about the possibilites offered by the Valve.) An academic won’t be published in, say, the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly or the NYRB without credentials that are difficult to acquire juggling academic work with stories about Boy Scouts all over the world doing exciting, meaningful things.

Trust me: I’m not overestimating (it’s how I make my living). I think you’re agreeing with me that there are a very small number who make upwards of six figures, but disagreeing on my “one thousand” who make twenty or thirty thousand with a combination of freelance journalism and books. I honestly don’t know what the number of such people is (any NWU folks here?), and a thousand may be a touch high—especially since, on reflection, most of my friends doing such writing are… also in academia. But, for the serious writer/journalist not named Gladwell, there is a fair amount of grant money to be had in most states, and if you’re able to get a book done every couple/few years, and doing the library readings/foundation panels/visiting writerships in addition to the occasional piece for NYT, GQ, Salon.com, Nerve, etc. (or even the one quasi-serious piece that runs in your local NPR glossy or lifestyle magazine every month) you can certainly make a go of it as a non-famous writer—if you can make a go of it on twenty grand a year (everyone shout: “I love you, sweetie!”). Which is to say what I said rather sloppily in my post-game drunkenness (Big[11]Ten goes down again… sigh) last night: there’s no danger that the allure of the marketplace is going to drive tens of thousands of academics off the farm when the alternative is to bust-ass to make twenty grand a year—and the number of slots available for people who can do that is 1 in a 100 by comparison to posts in academe.

Henry,

In the morning light, I now see that you also share some disagreement with Rhoten’s piece—and I especially like your re-statement. For some reason (more likely: unreason, courtesy of Maker’s Mark and Roy Williams) I had thought you agreed that there was a brain-drain from Academe…

The other approach is to cross-subsidize: anything technical, corporate or trade-specific pays heaps better than the general interest magazines that build an image as a Public Intellectual.

Plus, at certain points in the media ecology, blogs are having a serious impact. I’m remembering a picture of Atrios and Kos from last summer, and I think the caption ran something like: “Bloggers of Eschaton and DailyKos. Together they have a greater daily circulation than the Philadelphia Inquirer.” There may be low barriers to entry, but that big a public ain’t just whistlin Dixie.

I obviously didn’t make myself as clear as I would have liked to in my post. When I said “low-rent public intellectuals” I was referring to blogging. I was writing in a slightly self-deprecatory, but also rather literal fashion. What I meant to convey was that blogging was a form of public intellectualizing that didn’t take itself as seriously as Sontagizing, but that was also, literally “low-rent”: you didn’t have to pay much to blog in relative terms, or devote the years of blood sweat and relentless networking that you need to if you want to publish in the NYRB. The point about the economic conditions of production is well taken, and something that I’d meant to address more explicitly in my post, and never gotten around to. All very well for a scientist going to Google, but if you leave your academic job to become a Critic, unless you’re very lucky and very gifted, you’ll likely starve. Scott McLemee (who didn’t bother going the academic route) has done it and made it work; can’t think of anyone else of my acquaintance who has pulled it off. So blogging allows you to continue to put a crust on the table through your day job, but to have a second secret identity; you spot the need for a bit of public intellectualizing, dash into a public phone-box, and re-emerge in your mask and pajamas, ready to blog.

On a related note, I pulled together a list of luminaries and less-than-luminaries from the world of social media, judged by technorati and other rankings, and was curious to see how academic affiliation had any bearing on how well-regarded the commentator was. Check out the Social Media Scorecard.

A widely-published, award-winning author can, at best, make a hundred grand a year (or so—mostly less) as an writer of pieces for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New Republic, etc., including the books that come out of their more distinguished articles every few years—at the top end of the scale. The number of such authors in America right now cannot number more than a hundred. After this small number, there are perhaps a thousand or so who can expect to make twenty or thirty thousand a year doing journalism, reviews, and a mid-list book every few years. By comparison to the number of professors in the various fields that might overlap the concerns of the Public Intellectual (extending this title to serious journalism/novelists/etc), there are tens of thousands of professors of philosophy, literature, political science, history, economics—easily numbering a thousand to one the number who can make a similar living within the Academy to those the outsiders can make talking to the public (and, I note, there is no tenure, health insurance, pension, or sabbatical outside).

What is not an indulgence, is the state in the sciences, where there is both a lot of money to be made and the tremendous satisfaction of seeing one’s intellect made manifest in both invention and in the organism of business. (Though again, here, I should say that there’s a naive pejorative—and it’s old, I think of Henry Adams’ remarks in his Education—that business is somehow “simple,” when the fact of the matter is that running a company—or even a small part of one as a manager—commands a tremendous amount of both intellectual and emotional intelligence, rapid decision-making skills under exceptional uncertainty, etc., and is under-rated by orders of magnitude by those who’ve never shouldered such responsibility).

But, in the humanities, there is a feed-trough now larger than there has ever been in human history and it is only in a moment of deep unreflectiveness that anyone feeding there could think that they were better off elsewhere.

Separately, I think the thing most-missed in discussions of Public Intellectuals, when talked about by academics, is the risk taken in talking to a general audience, with the notion that you will tell them some truth that you think it important for them to hear. Namely, that you must do so on your own terms, from the stuff of your experience and imagination, in their language. I was just talking the other day to an aspiring writer who complained that he “did not come in contact with the right books at the right time.” Well, Homer hadn’t come in contact with any books, Wittgenstein was famous for his lack of reading (and what he did read: Tagore?), and how large do you suppose Shakespeare’s library was? Which is to say, the footnoted mental universe has corrupted the perception (and courage) of many who would have been better off in the first place learning a) how to use their own language and b) how to look at the world with their own trusting eyes: and this would scare the shit out of most academics (though, I would add not the CT crew, whom I admire with all my heart).

Finally, yes: I think blogging is a fantastic way to bridge the security and obscurity of Academy (though, I should add: I don’t mean to trash academy—just those who think they are injured there) with the hurly-burly of the blogosphere and the commenting hoi-polloi (though, on this last, why use the definite article from the Greek—shouldn’t we just say the polloi? Reminds me of a hilarious faux paus from Sullivan’s days at TNR when he wrote, not kidding, “there is a certain malicious schadenfruede pleasure…”).

1. Suppose that you’re still in grad school and not sure whether or not you want to dedicate your career to your chosen field or simply keep it as a hobby and do something else in your working life.

2.Suppose blogs didn’t exist.

In order to “do” an academic field as a hobby under these circumstances – especially in the humanities – you could do little more than read on your own, maybe keep in touch with a few like-minded individuals, audit classes every now and then. If you’re really dedicated you could write on your own as an amateur – meaning, in this case, a non-academic rather than someone without pay – and if you’re good you might be able to get book contracts that would allow you to do deeper research.

But since blogs do exist now, and since many people find that they enjoy writing even if they don’t attract a wide readership, and since there are plenty of good reasons to not want to deal with the job market or the sometimes/often frustrating professional culture of academia, blogging is actually a viable alternative to academics. It can be a way of making a hobby more fulfilling.

Another way of putting it:

From an institutional perspective, blogging will never replace academia. But from a personal perspective, many individuals certainly could choose to keep a blog rather than go through the long process of becoming an academic. I suspect a number of people have already done so.

Perhaps these people would have become “marginal scholars” – as the saying goes – or perhaps they would have made significant impacts on their fields. The point is that they chose another job, along with a blog, over academia.